Adding partial foldl1' to Foldable?

Viktor Dukhovni ietf-dane at dukhovni.org
Sun Dec 20 22:15:57 UTC 2020


Given that Foldable currently has:

    - foldr and foldr'
    - foldl and foldl'
    - foldMap and foldMap'

and also has only:

    - foldr1
    - foldl1

it seems natural to ask whether there it should also have a strict
variant of at least foldl1, since the non-strict variant has rather
limited applicability, and users would/should in most cases want/use
the strict `foldl1'` instead.

-- 
    Viktor.

P.S.  I just joined the list today, but noticed that coincidentally, there's
already a recent dicussion of Foldable1, which rather overlaps with this
question, and perhaps the partial `foldr1` and `foldl1` should be seen
as deprecated, once a suitable class of non-empty containers provides
total variants.  But perhaps on the other hand, given that the partial
functions already exist, perhaps adding the strict companions is
warranted?

I am asking because I am writing some expository prose for
Data.Foldable, to go at the bottom of the document, structurally along
the lines of what I contributed for Data.Traversable, but with a fairly
different focus.  The goal is draw careful distinctions between
strict recursive and lazy corecursive reductions, explaining their
proper usage and typical implementations.  The "missing" `foldl1'`
was something I ran into while working on part of the writeup.


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